A Normal Night
by DeeMG
Summary: Halloween can be a night for horrors. Rated for gore and violence. Mirage-verse


It rained on Halloween. The tunnels were dark, and water ran in heavy streams down the centers of every path they took. Water exploded upward in great sheets from every footfall as they ran. Water dripped off the tunnel roof, poured in from the storm drains, and drenched them from all sides.

Leonardo could only hope that the water was proving to be more of a hindrance to those who were following them, than it was to him and his brothers.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see that Michelangelo was limping badly as he ran. When they'd been ambushed topside – how long ago? – Michelangelo had fallen off the fire escape and landed the wrong way on his left leg. Leonardo had to assume that it wasn't broken, since Michelangelo was running with them still.

There wasn't anything that could be done about it at the moment anyway.

They gained the relative shelter of a narrower, older, dry tunnel that had been blocked by construction many years ago, and paused to catch their breath and assess the situation. "How the hell did they get ahead of us?!" Raphael hissed.

"Don't know," Leonardo panted. He scrubbed the back of his wrist across the itchy line of stage makeup around his eyes – April had sworn that it went a long way toward making them look like humans wearing turtle costumes, and helped them blend in even better in the Halloween crowds.

"They had to have been waiting for us," Donatello speculated. His hands curled in pure reflex around a _bo_ that he didn't actually have – they'd left all their obvious weapons at home, in favor of looking like…well, like humans wearing turtle costumes. It looked like another in a line of bad decisions, Leonardo reflected; decisions that had begun with his reluctant agreement to allow the usual Halloween trick-or-treat excursion to happen at all. At eighteen, it seemed like something that they all should have grown out of, but it was still one of the few opportunities that they had to be on the surface interacting with humans, and it was hard to give that up.

Michelangelo's bag of candy had been the first casualty of the skirmish on the surface, when the Foot clan had melted out of the shadows of the alley where the best entrance to the sewer tunnels was located. "Hope April's not gonna be too mad about her pillowcase," Michelangelo tried on a smile as he seemingly read Leonardo's mind about the loss.

"We won't know until we get home," Leonardo edged closer to the tunnel entrance and listened carefully to the sounds of the water in the spaces beyond it. He held his hand out, palm down, in a gesture ordering silence, and they obeyed.

There was too much noise going on in the sewers. He couldn't hear anything specific beyond the sounds of water rushing into and through the tunnels. The echoes were extreme, and drowned out anything else.

He pulled back away from the entrance and huddled with his brothers. "They might be out there," he whispered almost soundlessly. "The water is covering up any noises. That might work for us, but it's also working for them. We can't risk leading them back to the lair, or to April's place." He paused to look each of them in the eye, making sure they were on board with him so far. "We'll head for the old lair, the Y'lentian place, and then use the water access in the main room to get down into the tunnels that they can't reach. Once we're sure they aren't on our trail, we'll head for home. Don, you take point. Mike, you're with me. Raph, cover the rear."

They nodded.

There weren't any obvious foes in sight when they eased their way out of the tunnel. Leonardo had a pang of second-guessing himself – _maybe we should've stayed put and waited them out?_ – but squashed it by reminding himself that Michelangelo was hurt and needed to get home.

No one challenged them. They splashed through the rivers that flowed through the tunnels as soundlessly as possible. It was slow going, to move silently through water, and Leonardo's skin crawled at the idea that they were spending so much time exposed.

Shadows moved through the tunnels. They sank into them, moved from one to the other, and picked their way forward with all the care they could muster.

The lack of resistance raised Leonardo's internal alarms more than an actual fight would have. He twitched his head around again, obsessively checking that Raphael was still behind him, glancing over Michelangelo's shadowy movements for a clue as to his injury, and once again confirming that Donatello was still in the lead.

_Where are they?_ he wondered frantically. _There's no way the Foot just gave up and went home, not when they had us on the run like that._

He itched for the feel of a sword hilt in his hand. The only weapons any of them had carried that night were small throwing stars and smoke pellets, and most of those were lost or used in the initial skirmish.

_We were lucky to get away at all,_ Leonardo berated himself. _What was I thinking, letting Mike play around on that fire escape like it was a jungle-gym? Like we were just normal kids out on a Halloween night? Why wasn't I paying enough attention? Why didn't I hold firm, and refuse to allow any of them to go to the surface tonight? _

But it was so hard to look into those happy, expectant faces and say the word, "No."

_This is all my fault. I should've been stronger, I should've been paying more attention, I should've insisted on a better plan. _

Ahead of them, Donatello raised his hand and dropped into a defensive crouch. Leonardo's arm shot out, bringing Michelangelo to a halt. Behind them, Raphael stepped closer and also stopped.

They waited, silently. The water poured down around them.

It was cold.

Donatello made some small move – a partial step forward, maybe – and then tilted his head, as if listening to something in the water-filled tunnels all around them.

And then his head went on tilting to the side, far past the point of flexibility, and Donatello sagged to his knees…as his head rolled completely free of his body. He slithered into the river of water at the center of the tunnel, body and head together but forever disconnected, and began to float away from them.

Someone screamed, a hoarse, disbelieving sound: _"Donnie!!"_

The Foot clan crawled out of the shadows around Donatello's body and swarmed them before the echoes of that anguished cry had even started.

Leonardo seized the first luckless fool who came in reach, slamming the man's head down into the rushing stream with enough force to break bone against the cement and then holding him under savagely while ripping the sword from the man's hand and using it to impale the next Foot to rush up on him. "Donnie!" he couldn't stop himself from calling the name one last time.

Beside him, Michelangelo had a _keibo_ he'd taken in a similar fashion, and was wielding it with deadly force. Raphael leaped over them both, grabbed a Foot soldier's head between his hands, and twisted – then snatched the man's _kusarigama_ before he even fell, turned, and disemboweled the nearest soldier with the sickle-bladed end.

"Move!" Leonardo ordered.

Raphael stood in the tunnel like he would defy the order, panting and snarling in his fury, but gave ground as his brothers rushed toward him. Together, they ran down the flowing water, no longer concerned about silence or their own safety. They ran after the current that had taken their brother away, and they didn't care who followed them at that moment.

But the Foot were right behind them.

Michelangelo stepped badly onto his injured leg, gasped, and fell. Leonardo stood over him while he got back up – in one heartbeat, they were surrounded and fighting off attackers who simply wouldn't stop. Nothing he did was enough to drive the Foot clan off long enough for them to get away!

Raphael was an unstoppable force, dealing out death on all sides. Black-clad bodies piled up around him.

Leonardo leaped over the running water to take out three more foes who melted out of the shadows. He snatched another blade from the hand of a dying opponent, and felt more balanced with a weapon in each hand.

Michelangelo dropped his _keibo_ and took up an _ono_ that he simply ripped out of the grip of a Foot soldier who charged him, turning it back and using it to cut the man almost in half before dropping his body into the stream to pile up with the bodies around Raphael.

It still wasn't enough.

There wasn't any end to the numbers of Foot soldiers willing to crawl out of the shadows and die on their weapons. Leonardo and Michelangelo stood shell-to-shell and fought off uncounted fighters. Raphael was separated from them by an ever-growing pile of the dead and dying, but they could hear him still snarling curses as he fought –

– and then they couldn't hear him anymore.

Leonardo turned wide eyes to the mountain of bodies, the enormity of his mistake crashing on him with the silence. _"Raph!"_

He and Michelangelo abandoned the fight at the same moment to scramble over the bodies of the fallen. And for the moment the Foot allowed this, breaking off the attack long enough for the brothers to get over the barrier of bodies that blocked them from their brother.

Their dying brother…Raphael lay against the wall of the tunnel as if he'd been smashed there like a bug. His right shoulder and upper chest were a pulped ruin. His right arm was almost severed. He was covered in blood. At least part of it was his own.

"Raph!"

His eyes glinted as he heard them call his name, and he shifted under their frantic hands. "H – "

And then he was gone. His eyes dulled.

_How did I let him get so far away?_ Leonardo wondered numbly. _How did I lose sight of him so fast?_

Then Michelangelo screamed in fury and launched himself at a Foot soldier carrying a heavy _kanabo_, a metal-studded club that gleamed red with blood in the low light of the tunnel.

The battle was on again.

The Foot poured out of the shadows and drove them backwards down the tunnel. Michelangelo was a frantic blur of motion as he attacked, again and again, with the bloody axe. Leonardo guarded his injured side, alert to the chance of a conveniently-placed side tunnel that would allow them to escape, to catch their breath, to plan a counter-attack to get back the bodies of their own dead. But there was nothing. The tunnel they were in stretched, unbroken, for as far as the eye could see.

The water that flowed around their legs, up to their knees, was warm with the blood that flowed from the new corpses.

_We've got to get out of here!_ Leonardo readied his swords and his mind for a counter-attack that might buy them time to get to the surface. It wasn't what he wanted – every instinct he had screamed for them to go deeper into the underground for safety, instead of running out into the open air of the surface world – but they didn't have a lot of options left, and he was determined to protect Michelangelo at all costs –

Beside him, Michelangelo made a choked, gurgling noise.

The Foot once again paused in their attack. Leonardo grabbed his brother as he staggered and fell. "Mikey!"

There was no answer. Michelangelo couldn't have answered if he wanted to – the wide gaping slash across his throat put an end to his voice. Blood pumped feebly out of the severed carotid artery to splash down Leonardo's plastron, and then stopped altogether when his heart gave out.

_Nononono!_ Leonardo's mind gibbered at him. _Not him, too; I can't be the last, I can't! _

But there he was, cradling the body of one dead brother in a tunnel that had claimed the lives of the other two as well.

"Come and finish the job, then," he rasped at the lurking Foot soldiers. He set Michelangelo's body down as gently as he could into the current, and hoped that it would carry him to Donatello, at least. Then he reached for his stolen swords and stood there in the stream, blades at the ready. "Come for me, damn you!"

Incredibly, infuriatingly, the gathered Foot soldiers…did nothing.

He advanced on them, blades gleaming.

They retreated from him.

"Finish it, you miserable cowards!" he shouted, and charged them.

Smoke obscured the air then, and when it cleared, he was all alone in the tunnels. Even the bodies of the dead – his and theirs – were gone. "No," he whispered as horror shook him. "No, this can't be. No, I can't be the last, I can't have lost them like that!"

The water ran cold around his legs. _I don't even have a scratch on me, and they're gone and it's all my fault, I wasn't fast enough, I didn't plan well enough, I should've been on point, I should've been closer to Raph, I should've moved faster, my fault, my fault, my fault – _

***

" – my fault!" Leonardo sat up in bed, still speaking to himself.

He stared into the darkness, not quite believing what he saw. The cracked brick walls of his bedroom told him nothing.

There was faint light coming from the main room and playing through his open bedroom door. Leonardo gasped when he saw it – that soft bluish light anchored him back in the waking world.

_A nightmare, then_. He still wasn't completely sure it was over, the dream had been so strong! He drew himself up off the futon on shaking legs. The heavy quilt had fallen to the floor sometime during the night, leaving him cold – he draped it around his shoulders and went out in search of the light.

The metal stairs were cold and hard under his feet. He'd never felt them quite so harshly before. Leonardo clutched the edges of the quilt more tightly around himself and shivered as he drifted soundlessly into the main area.

Static played on three of the televisions.

Donatello spoke without looking up from his monitors. "System diagnostics show that there was a power outage about thirty minutes ago. Looks like there's a brown-out going on – must be an overloaded transmission station nearby." He shook his head and traced something on the screen. "Did Mikey wake you up, screeching about his precious monster movie marathon?"

"No…" Leonardo looked over at the sofa. Michelangelo lay draped across the lumpy cushions, a bag of Halloween candy tucked against his side, limp with sleep. Klunk was curled on his chest. Leonardo could see the little orange cat rise and fall with the movement of Michelangelo's plastron.

Raphael lay sprawled in the recliner. His snores were enough to reassure anyone that he still lived.

Still alive…

"Leo?" Donatello regarded him with dark eyes still rimmed with stage makeup from their Halloween trick-or-treat excursion a few hours earlier. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I just…had a bad dream, that's all." Leonardo looked around at his brothers, his living brothers, again.

"Ah. Too much Halloween candy?" Donatello speculated. "That can give anyone nightmares, especially that stuff that's shaped like eyeballs…."

Leonardo shook his head, a fond smile growing across his face as the last of the evening's terror finally retreated back out of his waking memory. "It wasn't that, really. It was just…an ordinary night." He shrugged, and tightened his grip on the quilt to keep it from sliding to the floor. "Just a normal night, for me."


End file.
